


The Blinking of Eyes At The Sun

by conceptofzero



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-24
Updated: 2013-05-24
Packaged: 2017-12-12 20:00:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/815461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/conceptofzero/pseuds/conceptofzero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the first three sweeps of her life, Damara is unaware of the world outside. She has her room and the halls of the apartment she shares with her guardian. Locked doors are as familiar to her as the shuttered windows she finds everywhere. The few books that are provided to her do not speak of a world beyond the rooms she knows and for sweeps, she believes that everything there is exists within the rooms and halls. </p>
<p>She believes in many things that she realizes too late aren’t true.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Blinking of Eyes At The Sun

For the first three sweeps of her life, Damara is unaware of the world outside. She has her room and the halls of the apartment she shares with her guardian. Locked doors are as familiar to her as the shuttered windows she finds everywhere. The few books that are provided to her do not speak of a world beyond the rooms she knows and for sweeps, she believes that everything there is exists within the rooms and halls. 

She believes in many things that she realizes too late aren’t true. 

Damara believes that silence is natural and she learns to flinch from every sound she makes, hating the way her every error echoes through the halls, despising how her voice sounds compared to her guardian, who is always so perfectly silent, no matter what he does. She practices when she’s alone, trying to smother the sound of her footsteps. There are entire days spent in the empty ballroom, stepping and adjusting and stepping again, learning to breathe softly and shallowly, until she is nearly as silent as the marble floors. No matter how well she does, how silent she seems, it only takes the presence of her guardian to remind her that she will never be silent enough. 

She believes she will one day become like her guardian. What little knowledge she’s given reveals nothing of her species or their history. The books teach her to solve sums and the books teach her etiquette and the books teach her to clean. Later, much later, they’ll teach her other things, like how to kill and how to lie, but at three sweeps, she learns things that seem to serve no purpose, other than to please Doc Scratch. She often looks at herself in the mirror and wonders when the change will come. Damara imagines herself with no face and no horns, with soft hands and silent steps. She practices and prepares for a day when that change will come. 

Damara has grown used to trying to turn the locked doorknobs, one hand idly stretched out to grasp and turn them as she walks between her room and the others. She’s so used to feeling the stiff jerk as the knob hits the lock that when it smoothly rounds, she nearly trips over her own feet. The door has always been locked, but today it opens, leading to a place she’s never been before. Damara stays frozen in the doorway, looking at new room, as green as all the others she’s seen before, but lacking in furniture. 

Her first instinct is to close the door and she does, letting it shut tight. Then she turns the doorknob to see if it was an accident that it opened. Once again, the knob turns smoothly and swiftly, and the door falls open, revealing that large room again. On second glance, she realizes there is a sort of doorway in the floor, this one leading down. This realization hits her like a physical blow. She’s spent her entire life on one plane and until this moment, never realized that there could be such a thing as something below the floor. 

Damara’s curiosity gets the better of her. It’s been starved from years of Doc Scratch feeding her scraps and meager morsels of information, just enough to whet her appetite but never enough to satisfying it. She is starving for something new and through this open door, she sees something worth gorging herself on. The stairs (a name she will only learn later, after she has been forcibly returned home) are a little frightening at first, but she quickly learns to go down them. 

One floor leads to the next and Damara just keeps descending. Some of the doors she passes are open, leading to other green floors, identical to those she passed before. Some are locked tight and will not budge. Other times, there are no doors at all, just empty walls and stairs that beckon her on. Down and down she climbs, counting the stairs. Each floor has a total of seventeen steps, eight and then a large flat landing and then eight more until she reaches the next floor. She’s so used to going down that when she hits the bottom floor and turns to go down the next flight, she steps right into the green plaster wall that marks the end of her journey. 

The door here is unlocked and it leads into a place unlike the other floors. This floor is taller, twice the size of any other floor. Perhaps this explains why there was no door on the floor above. Everything is green here and there are signs posted saying things like “Swimming Pool” and “Laundry” and “Parking”. Damara walks over plush green carpet, dragging her hands over a wooden desk and vases full of fake flowers. 

There are more doors, a pair of two that face each other, and this time when Damara steps through them, she finds herself in a room larger than any she’s ever seen in her life. It’s so big that the ceiling is taller than all the rooms she followed down stacked together, so far away that she can’t see the edges where the wall meets ceiling. Her steps falter for a moment, staring at something so vast that it fills a part of her with mild terror. 

But then she reminds herself that she went down all those stairs and that nowhere in the things she’s been taught has there ever been mentioned something like this. Damara takes a few more steps forward, down the short but wide staircase, and takes in the strangeness of the place she’s found herself in. 

Buildings are everywhere, though she doesn’t know that name for them at the time. When she sees them, she doesn’t know what to call them. They’re giant rectangles set on their ends, and they’re dotted with holes covered with glass, and on their tops some have spires and some have nubby things dotting the sides. She turns around and looks up, way way up, and realizes that the rooms she came out are one of those boxes too. All those rooms, contained in a single building. All those buildings, full of rooms? 

And at the very top, she sees white among the green and for one horrible moment, thinks that she’s looking at Doc Scratch, as large as he was when she was still a grub. Damara stumbles back and away, and then runs down the steps and out into the street, running as far and as fast as she can. She doesn’t know where she’s going but she runs, legs pumping. For the first time in her life, there are no doors to keep her, no hallways to box her in, no rooms to slow her. There’s just all this endless empty space in front of her and she runs until her lungs burn and her mouth tastes hot and salty. 

When she can’t run anymore, she walks and loses herself in those endless green streets and buildings. When she can’t walk, she stops and sits right on the ground, lying there while her legs burn and her body sweats. Damara lies down, horns clicking against the hard tarmac and she looks up. Staring up at the ceiling, she looks for the end and finds it’s as far away as it was when she first stepped out of the building. The edges are still nowhere in sight and while there are walls around here, they aren’t boxing her in. 

Free is not a word she knows, but it’s a concept she first grasps, lying in the empty street. This is free. What she was before was not. 

It ends. Doc Scratch comes to her, and there is a second when she sees him against the world and realizes how well he fits here, and how she doesn’t, and then there is a flash of light and she is back in her room. The walls feel so much smaller now that she’s see a place with no walls. 

She asks to return as graciously as she can, remembering all the manners he’s taught her. He tells her that she will not see those streets again for many sweeps, but that she will try fruitlessly. Damara asks again, thinking that perhaps this is a test of her skills. She even offers to let him decide what they will see and promises to be a faithful and attentive student. 

Doc Scratch asks Damara if he has ever told her a lie. 

Now she begs to return, feeling for the first time in her life a sort of mounting frustration against her guardian. It could be part of their lessons, she counters, trying desperately to bargain with him. It could be a reward for good behavior. Hasn’t she been good? Hasn’t she done as he’s asked? His only response is to tell her that she has studies to complete and that they will speak of this no more. 

Her jaw sets. She’s seen a place outside of this and now that she knows it’s there, she can’t stand to stay here any longer. This time, she does not beg or bargain with him. She tells him that she will return, with or without his permission and there’s nothing he can do to stop her. 

Doc Scratch locks her in her room and does not feed her for three days. 

He didn’t lie, as much as she wishes he did. It’s many sweeps before she runs out the doors again, out into a place she now knows as outside, through streets. She understands free by then and she understands how something you’ve tasted only once can haunt you for years. 

But there’s a lesson left to learn and Damara learns it when she finds her path blocked by something more terrible than Doc Scratch could have ever hoped to be. 

That’s the day she learns that the only freedom she will ever know is death.


End file.
